Whither the Earth? From the Amazon fires to the Arctic melt, School Strikes for Climate and an American Anthropological Association meeting focused on the topic, the year 2019 marked an unprecedented momentum in discussions of our planetary futures. In many parts of the globe, climate change denial is giving way to a growing consensus about the proportions of the danger, and the capital seems to have followed suit. But what are the implications of this epic shift? As the urgency of anthropogenic climate change unfolds in front of us, this collection takes a moment to reflect on the political, socioeconomic, and ethical work done in its name. By attending to the “grey” residues behind the “green” screens—lives and processes hidden behind the authoritative figures of planetary crisis—it chronicles the transforming forms of dispossession and othering, submission, lie, and waste done in the name of greening capital. In many ways, green capitalism is repeating the spoils of its older brothers—colonialism, carbon democracy, development—inducing what some call “climate apartheid.” But the division is not so neat, for, along with the risks, the situation also presents an array of gains, differentially distributed across the vectors of nation and race, class, gender, and age. The same sense of opportunity echoes in the ongoing social movements—civic and insurgent, indigenous and generational, left and right—who, while trying to seize the green from the state–capital embrace, end up discovering new forms of authority, community, and knowledge-making in the process. This collection thus calls for understanding the climate change as a revolution of not only geological (Anthropocene) and world history (Capitalocene) frames, but of the ways the political horizon shifts for all engaged. Whither the Earthlings?

Posts in This Series

Introduction: Against the Green Screen

Introduction: Against the Green Screen

In 2001, the UK donated a medical waste incinerator to Macedonia. A gesture of environmental humanitarianism, the incinerator was to upscale the waste removal p... More

Wind Fever: Green Energy and Its Fetishes

Wind Fever: Green Energy and Its Fetishes

There is little doubt that the wind turbine has become a preferred icon of a new kind of capitalism: green and efficient, kind and daring, simple and smart. Con... More

Sun Grab: Failing Futures in Greece

Sun Grab: Failing Futures in Greece

The future of the Greek nation was once pinned to the potential of natural resources, particularly the sun and wind. In the bleak crisis years immediately after... More

Green Freeze: Fueling Discontent with Environmental Metrics

Green Freeze: Fueling Discontent with Environmental Metrics

Chinese air pollution, often decried as smogaggedon or airpocalypse, infamously blankets homes and enters lungs. This happens in highly uneven ways, as expensiv... More

Governing through Eco-Anxiety

Governing through Eco-Anxiety

A recent NASA satellite image identifies the South African province of Mpumalanga as a global hotspot for emissions linked to coal burning plants and oil refine... More

On Bolivian Lithium

On Bolivian Lithium

Bolivia reputedly holds more than half the world's known lithium reserves, which the latest U.S. Geological Survey estimates at twenty-one million tons, crucial... More

Socialist Greens: On Vernacular Environmentalisms

Socialist Greens: On Vernacular Environmentalisms

Popular discourses about environmental mobilizations in socialist Eastern Europe frequently frame these movements as nothing less than revolutionary. Reacting t... More

Urbane Ruins: Of Tashkent’s Trees, Old-Timers, and Newcomers

Urbane Ruins: Of Tashkent’s Trees, Old-Timers, and Newcomers

At a time when urban greening and the large-scale planting of trees have been universally accepted as a relatively affordable and effective strategy to reduce c... More

Rivers to the People: Ecopopulist Universality in the Balkan Mountains

Rivers to the People: Ecopopulist Universality in the Balkan Mountains

After they had exhausted other opportunities for cash and foreign capital, the state regimes in the Balkans started to target natural resources as the next “wea... More

Slow Violence and the Youth Climate Movement

Slow Violence and the Youth Climate Movement

People keep asking me “what is the solution to the climate crisis.” And how do we “fix this problem.” They expect me to know the answer. That is beyond absurd a... More

The Mastery of Non-Mastery

The Mastery of Non-Mastery

We are now becoming like the soothsayers of old.1 We are now becoming like ancient stargazers each night asking the heavens whys and wherefores. We sense our an... More

Verdant Optimism: On How Capitalism Will Never Save the World

Verdant Optimism: On How Capitalism Will Never Save the World

Earth systems continue their collapse and the shadow of recognition spreads that humans (northern capitalist moderns anyway) are to blame. Still, a weird optimi... More